Dashboard Week: Wednesday – Gun Deaths in U.S.A.

by Pablo Sáenz de Tejada

Tuesday’s dataset was one of those that really impact you when you visualize the data: Deaths by gun fire in the U.S.A. from 14th of October 2012 to 22nd of March 2013: 2,244 deaths en 100 days.

The idea of creating this visualization is based in this post from the Huffington Post, where they created this amazing visualization of the same dataset, so I tried to create another viz that keeps the strength of the original. With this in mind, I create two bar charts with running totals, one with the deaths by date, and another one with the deaths by state, and one at each side of the dashboard.

I also change the position of the title, to make it look & feel a bit like in the TV news, add the map with the number of deaths in the size card and finally add also the names of the victims.

Finally it was action time, so you can filter all the dashboard by any of the charts. I think the filter of selecting a state and then a city works really well, showing in the date chart where those deaths occur, while if you select a City the State chart will only by highlighted instead. For the names I also add a link in the tooltip so you can decide when to click on it and visit the webpage with additional information of the incident. This is how it looks like all my actions window:

Actions

Last but not least, I change all the fonts so they fit better the topic of the viz and create big and clear tooltips that makes reading easier. I couldn’t decide between a light and a dark theme, so finally I create both dashboards. Which one do you prefer?

Dashboard whiteDashboard black

You can see them in my Tableau Public Profile.